Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison (18 February 1931-) was an American author and professor at Princeton University. She was best-known for her works Beloved, Margaret Garner, and Paradise, among others.

Biography
Chloe Ardelia Wofford was born in Lorain, Ohio on 18 February 1931, the daughter of a father who worked as a elder, and a mother who worked as a domestic worker. From her parents, she developed a love of reading and of music. She grew up in an integrated neighborhood, graduating with honors from Lorain High School in 1949. Following high school, she went to Howard University in Washington DC, where she majored in English and minored in classics. Morrison then went to Cornell University, where she earned her master's degree in 1955. With her master's degree in hand, she took a teaching job at Texas Southern University, but she left there in 1957 to take a teaching job at Howard. At Howard, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, and they married; they were separated when Morrison was expecting her second son. Morrison left teaching to take a job with a publisher, and her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published to critical acclaim in 1970. Despite the praise, the book did not sell well. Her second novel, Sula, appeared in 1973 and was nominated for the American Book Award. The Song of Solomon was published in 1977 and was the first book by an African-American to be made a selection of the Book of the Month Club since Richard Wright's Native Son. Beloved was published in 1987 and received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. The film version of Beloved appeared in 1998, starring Oprah Winfrey. Morrison became a professor at Princeton, where she established a workshop for writers. In 1993, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Morrison would later retire from Princeton, but she continued to write, publishing Paradise in 1998. A much honored writer, she produced, in addition to her literary fiction, children's books and a libretto for an opera about slavery, Margaret Garner.